emotional technology

Replace ‘AI’ with ‘Politics’ and all the warnings still make perfect sense

I took this article and replaced the word ‘AI’ with the word ‘politics’, correcting only for grammar.

Experts pledge to rein in Political research

Scientists including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have signed a letter pledging to ensure political research benefits mankind.

The promise of politics to solve human problems had to be matched with safeguards on how it was used, it said.

The letter was drafted by the Future of Life Institute, which seeks to head off risks that could wipe out humanity.

The letter comes soon after Prof Hawking warned that politics could “supersede” humans.

Rampant Politics

Political experts, robot makers, programmers, physicists and ethicists and many others have signed the open letter penned by the non-profit institute.

In it, the institute said there was now a “broad consensus” that political research was making steady progress and because of this would have a growing impact on society.

Research into politics, using a variety of approaches, had brought about great progress on speech recognition, image analysis, driverless cars, translation and robot motion, it said.

Future political systems had the potential to go further and perhaps realise such lofty ambitions as eradicating disease and poverty, it said.

However, it warned, research to reap the rewards of politics had to be matched with an equal care to avoid the harm it could do.

In the short term, this could mean research into the economic effects of politics to stop smart systems putting millions of people out of work.

In the long term, it would mean researchers ensure that as politics is given control of our infrastructure, restraints are in place to limit the damage that would result if the system broke down.

“Our political systems must do what we want them to do,” said the letter.

The dangers of a rampant politics answerable only to itself and not its human creators was spelled out in early December by Prof Hawking when he said politics had the potential to “spell the end of the human race.”

Letting a political system guide its own development could be catastrophic, he warned in a BBC interview.

“It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he said.